


six seconds

by EclipseWing



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canonical Character Death, Drabbles, Gen, In which I write drabbles about my fave six 100 characters, Spans all seasons, but there was a point in s3 I wanted Sinclair to just adopt these 6 broken teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 06:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11075601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EclipseWing/pseuds/EclipseWing
Summary: The first time Octavia set foot on the ground her daemon soared.[100 daemon AU drabble]





	six seconds

BELLAMY

She’s a wolf, she’s a fox, she’s a weasel, she’s a coyote.

Cora has always settled as predators ever since his mother put his second-old sister into his hands and let him name her. Cora’s a guardian. A protector.

She’s too damn large for this.

The ventilation shafts of Mount Weather are unusually large. Bellamy assumes it’s because it takes a lot of space to keep the mountain cool with radiation filtered oxygen to flow through it. Their damn mountain bunker reminds Bellamy just of the privileged sections of the Arc, right down to their propensity for the elaborate. The art, the music, the clothes, the food…

“Are you seriously planning to shave with a knife?” Maya asks him, looking a little bit shocked and little bit indignant, “No, no, my dad has a razor--“

“Did you get in a fight?” Jasper will ask later, staring at the cut on Bellamy’s chin. He’s never shaving with a razor again. Maya may also have neglected to give him a mirror, but it’s okay, because she’s feeding him, and her fluffy flying squirrel looks at him with those pleading eyes. Those eyes that beg him ‘don’t murder our people’ and Bellamy has to look away because he can’t promise anything.

Cora is still a predator. She settled the moment Aurora Blake was floated. Her coat is red and she’s gangly legged making her one of the largest daemons on the Arc. Already short for space the council hums and ponders over her form, before eventually marking it down as acceptable.

Bellamy’s known a man with a lionfish daemon to be floated because they couldn’t spare the water. A woman with a deer because they couldn’t spare the space. A red wolf is apparently just within the acceptable margins.

Now she snarls at the Mount Weather guards. She throws herself at the cage they put themselves in, she flees on swift feet from the explosion. She can’t climb up the tunnels but she finds her own ways through the shadows. She’s separated. Which the grounders still stare at with horror but those born in space barely flinch at. Space separated everyone’s daemons.

It’s still nice to see her bounding towards her with a smooth loping gait and a howl. The trapped delinquents cheer and Harper’s moth - Kirek - flutters it’s wings in preparation.

They’re going to war.

 

RAVEN

Orlan’s paws don’t drag as they walk down familiar hallways and even Raven has a spring in her step. Bellamy looks like he’s about to start drinking, but instead he sets the bottle down like it’s a promise. They’ll drink in when they leave.

Or at least - everybody else can. Raven will need her wits about her. She votes that they take it back to Earth in five years and drink it then. The bottle has lasted 97 years, been dragged to space, it can handle being dragged back down to being drunk on the soil on which it was created.

Cora is quiet and contemplative and Bellamy’s gaze doesn’t leave the window for more than a few seconds. Orlan raises one large paw to the window, resting it there.

Finn’s buried down there, Raven thinks somewhat hysterically. Her friends are down there. Bellamy’s sister. And Clarke…

She hadn’t planned to be the one leading. That was Clarke and Bellamy, it was always Clarke and Bellamy. But Clarke had died to get them up here, so the least Raven could do would be keep everyone alive for five years.

Or maybe Clarke didn’t die. She made it to the tower, she saved them. Maybe the nightblood will kick in.

Raven doesn’t know. Neither does Bellamy and it’s going to be five years of not knowing. Octavia is down their too, and Abby and Kane and Miller and--

Five years is a long time, she thinks. Five years might change a lot.

“It will be just like a long winter,” Orlan says, and it’s on purpose, she knows it is, and it’s to make the time seem shorter, to make it bearable. She chuckled - bearable. Orlan’s a bear, he can weather anything.

Raven can weather anything. She has already and she’s come through it, not necessarily stronger, but still going.

“We can get through this,” Bellamy says, and it’s almost to himself and Cora but Raven takes strength from it.

“We will,” she says, because they have to, because she chose to survive, they all chose to survive when they could have laid down and died. “Come on, shooter,” she says teasingly, and he smiles at the nickname she had once used tauntingly what feels like so long ago but wasn’t even a year. They have a lot longer ahead of them, they may as well start out on a good foot now. “Let’s get to work.”

She smiles and her smiles is not a happy smile, but it’s one of promise and of a future and of five years stuck together on a spaceship.

They’ve got one hell of a long winter to get through.

 

OCTAVIA

She took a step on the ground and Hades _soared_. All around her other deliquent’s daemons were taking to the sky, the ground, shifting into bigger and larger forms than they’d ever been allowed to on the Arc.

But only Hades settles in that single glorious moment under the sunshine and blue sky, flying high high _higher_ until she can barely see him above her. For a moment she thinks he’s going to fly away and leave her but then he drops in a dive.

He’s magnificent. Grey-blue feathers, black running from his eyes like tears and a black-barred tail. “A peregrine,” Jaha’s son says, sounding awed, “He’s a peregrine falcon, those are like the fastest animal.”

Nothing better for her Hadrian Hadrian Hades. He lands on Cora’s back, the wolf barely minding him there except to wag her tail. This is her, she thinks, quick dive and sharp talons. She’s a warrior.

She is a warrior, she will tell herself days months nearly a year later. She is a warrior, Lincoln had told her, Ceres a brightly coloured bracelet wrapped around his wrist. Octavia was never sure of the snake species - it was something she had always meant to ask him - Ceres had looked poisonous, looked deadly and terrifying and Octavia still remembers when the deliquents had been terrified of the strange grounder with his deadly snake.

She’d been the first to realise she wasn’t poisonous at all, and that Lincoln posed no threat.

But Lincoln dies and Ceres dies and Octavia keeps going. Hades flies faster, better, stronger and he’s a proper grounder daemon, and yet he’s not. Grounder daemons can’t separate the way Skaikru’s can. She has a grounder daemon who can separate like Skaikru which makes Octavia clearly neither.

It doesn’t matter. She’s got Hades and she’s got her horse - she can be whoever she damn well please.

She’s not the girl who lived under the floor. Not anymore.

 

JASPER

They’d thought Sofija would settle as a soft-furred meercat with clever paws and a gentle chitter right up until she didn’t.

Jasper doesn’t mind. Sofija is some sort of large beetle, iridescent gleam, funny brown and ochre speckles and he’d always intended to look through a book on the arc to try and find out exactly what species she was, but he never got the chance.

Then it’s earth and spears in his chest and he becomes grateful Sofija is small and easily pocketable. He keeps her close, protects her, tries to keep alive, tries to find his place in this new place and tries--

Tries not to fall in love with Maya and her soft fluffy flying squirrel daemon - Sofija buzzes around and Leth glides from the top of the painting he’s perched on down to meet her. Maya doesn’t mind his daemon isn’t fluffy or cute. It’s him, shining edges and clever buzzing as he saves his friends, tries to save everyone but--

Clarke already knows. Bellamy already knows. Maybe that’s why they were the leaders because Jasper is clearly not cut out for being a leader.

He’d never understood why Sofija settled as she did, not until Maya died and he saw how much death there was. Not until he realised how much they paid to live, how much they lost lost lost and just kept on losing. Not until he kept waiting for it to get better and it never did.

It was too much.

He didn’t need warm fluff or soft feathers. Sofija had made herself with an external skeleton to protect herself already from the world. It was only Jasper left who had to learn.

 

MONTY

They think she’s a rat.

They always think she’s a rat.

He’s never offended. Rats are smart. Clever. There were stories about rats abandoning towns before a natural disaster hits. She’s not a rat, but that’s not the point. She shares the same order as them and he’ll defend her cousin species just as fiercely as he’ll defend her.

She’s a degu. And sure, she looks a bit like a rat, but she’s slightly fatter and her tail is shorter and she looks more like a chinchilla, really.

It doesn’t matter. Levinia perfect and always has been from the moment she settled to the moment she hopped across to curl up in Harper’s arms. Harper’s Kirek takes to the air in surprise. He doesn’t land on Monty then. It’s too soon.

He does land on Monty’s hand gently when she goes with him, leaving the ruins of Arkadia. On their flight back into space it’s near impossible to tell whose daemon is whose - Kirek and Levinia keeps so close to both of them. Murphy stares at them and his own coyote is right next to Emori and her armadillo. Bellamy’s Cora had her ears pressed back, Echo and her osprey looks uncomfortable and out of place and really it’s only Raven and her bear who look happy.

“Do you think anyone will remember this?” Harper asks Monty later, a lot later sometime in those five years as they explore the abandoned Ark rooms and find a pile of history books. “2035, the human race re-enters space five strong.”

He slots his hand into hers and Levinia hops across to sit next to their held hands, “If we make it through this,” he says, “Then yes. Yes, we’ll tell them. Sure, word of mouth history isn’t as reliable, but our story will get told. Jasper’s story will get told. Monroe and Fox and Roma and everyone… they aren’t forgotten. It’s our duty to make sure someone remembers.”

“Well,” Levinia says, “We’ve got plenty of paper and stuff. Might as well get started now, right?”

Jasper gave up. Jasper couldn’t do it but Monty will. Monty will live so that everyone who has lost will keep on living with him.

And even isolated and trapped once more in space, he’s not going to do it alone, he thinks, as Harper tucks her head against his chest and he meets Levinia’s gaze.

He’s never alone.

 

CLARKE

Day 2000 passes like all the others. It happens.

Clarke had watched the sky until she didn’t anymore. Living her life one year after another in anticipation was no way to live, and so she made it a routine. A prayer. Her church in a way, looking to the sky where she had once come from.

“Does that make Bellamy your religion?” Pen asks, and she laughs because in a way it does, but that also makes her five friends up there in the sky as far away from her as ever. They’ve become like a myth, a story to tell Madi late at night.

A promise, a shooting star she’s still waiting to wish on.

She can wait a little longer, she decides. Prayer over for the day she moves on with her day. Food. Water. Shelter. Scavenge whatever she can find, teach Madi, try and claim back a bit more of this irradiated landscape.

Madi’s daemon still flits from cat to owl to racoon. She skips through the trees absorbing everything Clarke tells her. Clarke describes animals that she knows and the little girl’s daemon tries them out. Pen watches, tail flicking from side to side and he’s trying to be stately, but it fails when Aelius turns into a ridiculously fluffy kitten and pounces on it. The serval snarls at the kitten’s antics, but there’s no real heat behind it.

Pen’s never been so relaxed with any daemon in a long, long time. Maybe not since the Arc, since before her father died, back when he could still shift and would playfight with Well’s daemon. There have been times he’s been close - parties with the delinquents at the dropship, stalking freely with her and only her through the woods, Lexa--

She still misses Lexa’s Eagle Owl from time to time. Stately, a wingspan that could knock you over and large amber eyes, Neuros had been magnificent and terrifying. Yet he had also preened Pen’s fur, fluffed up his feathers until he was just a bundle of grey and brown and made funny cooing noises when Clarke had run her fingers over his plumage.

Neuros is gone now, vanished in a cloud of dust. So many daemons are nothing now and Clarke looks at the desolate landscape which is slowly, excruciatingly, beginning to repair itself.

They died, she reasoned, but the world will survive.

They will survive, and then they will rise.

(They have to).

**Author's Note:**

> Editing pending.
> 
> Of the 100 daemons the only one that I am absolutely 100% happy with is Octavia’s. The rest I could be persuaded to use a different animal and probably have gone through several choices before settling on the ones I have.
> 
> Clarke - Pen - Serval (his name is short for Pendragon from the King Arthur stories)  
> Bellamy - Cora - Red Wolf (Cora, from Kore, from Greek Mythology and a variant of Persephone - there is a great fic out there where her name is Percy, short for Persephone, which is actually perfect, which is why I’ve got a variant of that)  
> Octavia - Hadrian - Peregrine Falcon (Known as Hades, which makes Octavia and Bellamy have Hades and Persephone as daemons which is beautiful and tragic)  
> Monty - Levinia - Degu (Levinia means a bright flash or lightning bolt. I was going through chipmunks and prairie dogs and settled on this adorable little species)  
> Jasper - Sofija - Flower Chafer (It’s a type of scarab beetle, I spent five minutes on google but considering they don’t exactly have encyclopaedias in the 100 I’m going to assume that if you’re daemon is going to shift, it’s going to shift and Jasper never quite identifies the beetle type.)  
> Raven - Orlan - Grizzly Bear (short for Orlando. It was with Raven in mind that I went with Skaikru all have separated daemons due to the radiation. It gave them all an aspect making them different and almost made spacewalks feasible for Raven with her beautiful strong powerful bear)  
> Lexa - Neuros - Eagle Owl  
> Madi - Aelius - Not yet settled  
> Maya - Leth - Flying squirrel  
> Lincoln - Ceres - Milk Snake (I haven’t confirmed what kind of snake, but this is the main one I think of that looks like a Coral Snake but has a different stripe pattern but as I said, I haven’t confirmed this. Ceres is the Greek God of Spring).  
> Harper - Kirek - Moth (of some species I haven’t worked out)


End file.
